An Orange Pixel
flickers on the horizon, sandwiched between the inky azure of the
mid-Pacific and the robin’s-egg pale of the Hawaiian sky.
Richard
Jenkins is the first to see it—a sailing robot, which has been blowing
our way for a month.
We’re in a small motorboat 7 miles out at sea, just
north of Oahu’s windward shore. Dylan Owens gets the next good glimpse.
“I see the wing,” he exclaims, “and the tail!”

Photograph by Jos Cocquyt

Jenkins and Owens are the engineering duo behind Saildrone, which in
the words of their website is “a wind-powered autonomous surface
vehicle.”
On October 1, the 19-foot craft was set loose in the San
Francisco Bay with a simple command lodged in its electronic brain: Sail
to Hawaii.
For 2,248 nautical miles the boat did the rest.

The path it
chose happens to be identical to that of the annual Pacific Cup sailing
race, and the fastest anyone has traversed this course is just over five
days.
The single-handed-sailing record is eight and a half days.
As
Jenkins and Owens look on, Saildrone is about to complete what might be
called the first no-handed ocean sail: San Francisco to Hawaii in 34
days.
It’s not quick, but then again there is no one aboard to complain.

The journey has included a storm with gale-force winds followed by
two weeks of doldrums.
During the tempest, Saildrone was reporting
speeds of up to 16 miles per hour and angles as extreme as 75 degrees,
meaning it was heeled over and surfing down the backside of breaking
waves—waves with enough power to snap it in two had they caught the boat
in the wrong position.
The doldrums were equally worrisome: With no one
aboard to scrub the bottom, algae, seaweed, and barnacles might have
overtaken Saildrone, transforming it into just another piece of flotsam.

As the vessel sails into sight, I see that it’s a streamliner—a
narrow hull stabilized by two outriggers, one on each side. Its “sail”
is a sail in name only; in reality it’s a 20-foot-high, solid
carbon-fiber wing.
Extending from the back of this wing, halfway up the
mast, is a tail—just like an airplane’s.
(“That’s a little trick that I
stole from the Wright brothers,” Jenkins says.)
Above the waterline the
boat is painted safety orange and emblazoned with the words OCEAN
RESEARCH IN PROGRESS in all caps.
The hull is black with bottom paint,
and near the bow is the name in a fancy serif: Honey Badger.

The Honey Badger is more than a sailboat and more than a
robot, although it’s both of those things.
The Pacific crossing is
really a test of a new type of sail that automatically keeps itself
pointed into the wind, like a weather vane.
Adjusting a little tab on
the back of the tail—a task handled by the Honey Badger’s
autopilot—is enough to maintain the correct course and to angle the wing
so it creates forward thrust.
There’s no need to employ ropes, winches,
or even sailors.
The mechanism is so simple it might really be best
regarded as a plug-and-play power source.
Like a windmill, it converts a
ubiquitous natural resource into usable energy.

Autonomous sailing craft could be used to gather information on the vast, untraveled reaches of the world’s oceans .

Its potential goes far beyond record-setting jaunts to Hawaii.
One
obvious application is to mount the wing on a fleet of sensor-laden
drones and send them sailing into the world’s oceans, where they could
report on their findings.
“I want to get the data we need to show that
global warming is real,” Jenkins says.
To that end, they could monitor
ocean acidification, a key barometer of climate change.
Drones could
replace the world’s weather and tsunami buoys.
The waters around oil
platforms could be sniffed 24/7 for the first signs of a spill.
Tagged
sharks, whales, and other marine life could be followed and their
locations patched into the international marine-traffic control system
with a warning to stay away.
Protected borders, coastlines, islands, and
environmentally sensitive marine areas could be patrolled by drones
programmed to photograph any interloping ships.

But scientific and security uses are just the beginning.
The biggest
impact might be to industry: oil and gas, gold mining, diamond mining,
fisheries, shipping, military.
For all kinds of reasons—regulatory,
exploratory, classified—those industries need to know what is happening
in the vast, nearly invisible reaches of the world’s oceans.
Tallied up,
everything that is taken from or moves over the seas constitutes more
than $2.5 trillion a year in business activity—nearly 4 percent of the
total world economy.

What’s more, Saildrone’s technology is so efficient it could
potentially power vessels that today require a motor.
Jenkins has
developed a scaled-up version of his wingsail to propel passenger
ferries that ply the waters of the San Francisco Bay.
On windy days, the
ferry motors would power down while the wings did most of the work.
By
the time you read this, the ferry wing will be flying from a test sled
backed by two government agencies, sailing back and forth along commute
routes.
Jenkins is confident the test will prove that in only a few
years, the cost of retrofitting the ferries will pay for itself in fuel
savings.

As we draw closer, it becomes clear that the Honey Badger
has made the journey unscathed, and the mood changes from worry to
jubilation.
“She looks just like I left her!” Jenkins, the boat’s
mop-headed designer, says with genuine surprise in his voice. Owens—who
is responsible for Saildrone’s electronics—is similarly relieved.
“This
makes it concrete,” he says.
“For the past month it’s just been an icon
on a web page.”

On the way into the harbor with the Honey Badger in tow, the
men share Budweisers and congratulations.
“I was hoping to find a
castaway hugging the back or a tooth from a great white or at least some
guano on the deck,” Jenkins says.
“But it’s Honey Badger,” he
continues, his cherubic face twisting into the froggy expression that
always proceeds a joke.
Owens chimes in for the oft-repeated punch line,
a quip from the viral video that gave the craft its name.
“Honey Badger don’t care,” and then, with feeling: “Honey Badger don’t give a shit!”

Learning to design a yacht

Jenkins, 37, grew
up in a sailing town on the southern coast of England.
He made his
first ocean crossing at 16, working as a deckhand on a small yacht
sailing from Bermuda to Spain.
At 17 he was toiling as a draftsman at a
boatyard near his hometown of Lymington when he spied an abandoned wreck
tucked away in the back of the yard. It was an odd type of boat: a land
yacht, with wheels instead of a keel, and a hard wing instead of a
soft, floppy sail.
The owner of the yard explained that he had built it
for a customer who wanted to break the world land-sailing speed
record—which at that time stood at 98 mph—but it had never been
finished. Jenkins, sensing an opportunity to find fame and fortune,
asked if he could have the boat.
The yard owner not only agreed, he also
pretended not to notice all the carbon fiber that started going missing
around the shop as Jenkins poured himself into his repair work.
“I
thought it would take only a year or two to get the record,” Jenkins
says.
In fact it took him a little more than 10 years and nearly got him
killed a half-dozen times.

He rebuilt the land yacht in six months, and his initial attempts at a
new record, which took place on an active RAF airfield known for its
strong crosswinds, were very promising.
The problem was money: He needed
cash to keep improving the boat.
“I was just a poor student,” he says.
He spent a lot of time meeting potential donors—he even met Prince
Philip—and the resulting publicity alerted the world to his plans.
But
by the time Jenkins hit 98 mph in the craft he had christened the WindJet, an American team had raised the record to 116. To compete, he needed a new, faster boat.

For the second craft, the WindJet Mark 2, Jenkins designed a
much bigger wing and added IndyCar slicks.
The traction came in handy
at about 100 mph, when Jenkins spied a military cargo plane swooping
toward his runway with its landing lights on and its wheels down.
The Mark 3
was built of steel and tested on the high-traction salt flats of
Western Australia.
On its second run, the lead counterweight at the
front of the wing tore away from its mount, smashed through the cockpit
canopy, and came close to braining a helmetless Jenkins.
On the maiden
voyage of the Mark 4, the windward outrigger actually started
to take off like a plane, nearly causing a catastrophic capsize.
“It is
like gambling: It’s double or quits the whole time,” Jenkins says.

After four failed land-yacht designs, the situation was dire: The dry
season was over.
Zero resources.
Every credit card but one maxed out.
Jenkins had a decision to make.
Wait in Australia for another year,
until the next land-sailing season?
Or pack the land yacht into a
container bound for America and try there?
He went to America, and in
the spring of 2009, on a dry lake bed just south of Las Vegas, he
piloted a wind-powered sail rocket called the Greenbird to 126 mph.

On the morning of March 26th, on the dry Lake Ivanpah, The Ecotricity
Greenbird driven by British engineer, Richard Jenkins smashed the world
land speed record for wind powered vehicles. The Greenbird clocked 126.1
mph (202.9 km/h) , eclipsing the old, American held, record of 116 mph ,
set by Bob Schumacher in the Iron Duck in March 1999 at the same
location.

Jenkins was officially the fastest sailor in the world. Satisfying,
yes.
But after nearly a decade spent camping alone in the desert, he
figured that what he had gotten from the experience was mostly
adventure.
“I was completely unaware that the wing technology I had
evolved would be useful for anything except breaking land-sailing
records,” he says.

The wing that Jenkins created for that final, successful land yacht
had a tail. It’s not an obvious design. After all, most boats have soft
sails, not hard wings.
And even the sailboats that do have hard
wings—like the $10 million wingsailed racing catamarans that dueled in
last year’s America’s Cup—don’t have tails.
The tail was the
breakthrough idea that got Jenkins in the record books, it’s what got
Saildrone to Hawaii, and it’s what has the potential to disrupt a
multitrillion-dollar slice of the global GDP.
But to understand the
genius of Jenkins’ tail, it’s necessary to go back to first principles.

Airplanes have tails.
And tails have horizontal-flight-control
surfaces called elevators.
They govern the plane’s pitch and thus the
angle of the wings relative to the air moving across them. This angle
determines the lift the wings create.
More lift means the plane ascends;
less lift, it descends.

Once Jenkins started reaching airplanelike speeds in the Greenbird, he realized he needed a machine that worked less like a sailboat and more like an airplane.

Sailboats have sails.
Aerodynamically speaking, a sail is a wing.
But
the angle of a sail relative to the air moving across it—the wind, in
other words—is controlled and adjusted by means of ropes and pulleys.
Tremendous force (and usually a winch) is needed to set a sail so that
it cuts through the wind at the correct angle and creates the lift that
moves the boat.
And then the problem becomes keeping the sail at the
correct angle.
The boat may turn, which turns the sail with it.
The boat
may speed up, which changes the speed and direction of the wind passing
over it.
Or the wind may shift, changing speed and direction all on its
own.
In every case, the angle must be readjusted manually—that’s what
is meant by trimming a sail.

Once Jenkins started reaching airplanelike speeds in the Greenbird,
he realized he needed a machine that worked less like a sailboat and
more like an airplane.
At 126 mph, even the steadiest wind changes
constantly as you blast across it.
No human sailor has reflexes fast
enough to keep up with wind that shifts second by second.
The fastest
racing sailboats in the world use wings—but they are still operated like
sails, using ropes and pulleys and winches.Greenbird’s wing works totally differently—it’s controlled by its tail, like the wing on a plane.
The Greenbird
sails like an airplane flies, except that while the elevators on a
plane’s tail send it climbing up or gliding down, the tab on the Greenbird’s tail makes its wing pull left or right.
It’s the same basic action, just rotated 90 degrees.

A hard wing on a free-rotating mount is a much more difficult thing
to engineer than a mast—a simple pole held up by guy wires—but the
payoff is in the actual sailing.
By severing all the ropes that run
between the boat and the sail on a normal yacht, a lot of the complexity
of sailing goes away.
In a normal sailboat, every turn of the rudder
turns the sail.
Not so with a free-rotating wing, which by its very
nature is always correctly angled into the wind.
Furthermore, dialing in
the amount of sideways lift generated by the wing—thrust, in other
words—is a matter of adjusting the elevator-like tab on the back of the
tail.
The Greenbird had only two controls: the steering wheel and what was, in effect, a throttle.

6. The KeelIf
Saildrone gets knocked over, it will right itself because of the keel’s
weighting. Its steep angle sheds debris like kelp and lost fishing nets.(image : Brian Christie Design)

By the time he captured the land-sailing record, Jenkins had racked
up a pile of debt.
To start working it off, he accepted an offer to move
to San Francisco and help design a kite boat for Google cofounders
Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
It was interesting work, and he was
introduced to a whole new scene, one where out-there engineering
projects like the self-driving car and augmented-reality glasses were
the stuff of everyday life.
Suddenly his 126-mph accomplishment seemed
pretty insignificant.
“No one cares about land sailing,” Jenkins
thought, “but the first drone around the world?”

Jenkins realized that the wing he’d evolved for the Greenbird
would be perfect on an oceangoing drone.
Its tail simplified the
process of sailing so much that even a robot could handle it.
The bot
would need only three moving parts: the elevator-like tab on the tail,
the rudder, and the free-rotating wing itself.
What’s more, only two of
those parts—the tail tab and the rudder—would need power.
A few
off-the-shelf solar panels would provide more than enough.
Jenkins knew
from long experience that the fewer parts there were, the fewer parts
there were to break.
His oceangoing drone needed to be single-minded,
bulletproof, and absolutely spartan.

It happened that Owens was working in the same boatyard as Jenkins
was, though on a different project: writing software and building
watertight, salt-resistant, pressure-tested controllers for a submarine
project.
He too was daydreaming about building the first
around-the-world drone.
Jenkins, a boatbuilder, met Owens, a hacker, on
the shop floor in April 2010, and they quickly realized the obvious:
They should quit their jobs and join forces.

David VS Goliath

The two didn’t
actually form a company until they got a kick in the ass: News broke
that a startup called Liquid Robotics had already launched an oceangoing
drone.
The company had developed a line of boats it called Wave
Gliders, which harvest their energy from the up-and-down movement of
waves in the open sea.
An armada of four Wave Gliders set off from San
Francisco in November 2011 to cross the Pacific for Australia.
The goal:
Make it into Guinness World Records for the longest journey by
an unmanned autonomous surface vehicle.
It was a publicity stunt—Liquid
Robotics, which at the time was riding high on $36.5 million in VC
funding, wanted some press. It billed its invention as “the wheel for
the ocean.”

At first Owens thought that the wave-energy system was a pretty neat
technology.
But the more he learned about it, the less sense it made to
him.
Wave Glider’s top speed was incredibly slow: 2 mph in the best
conditions.
Too slow to get out of the way of bad weather, too slow even
to fight an ocean current like the Kuroshio or the Gulf Stream. And the
wave-energy harvesting mechanism that hung beneath?
It was full of
moving parts just waiting to get fouled by slime, kelp, barnacles, and
wayward fishing nets.

Jenkins was similarly perplexed, not just because Wave Glider was the
stupidest thing he’d ever seen, but because he couldn’t believe that
anyone would pay $36.5 million to develop the stupidest thing he had
ever seen.
Then again, the payoff for the fastest- sailor-in-the-world
thing had been exactly $0.
It was enough to make Jenkins reevaluate.
Who
exactly was the stupid one here?

“Poverty is the
mother of invention,” Jenkins says, and then he shows me the tail tab
control.
It’s just a piece of string connected to the tail by means of
an antique fishing reel.

Jenkins, eager to let some hot air out of the Liquid Robotics
balloon, originally planned to send Saildrone chasing after Wave Gliders
as they crept across the Pacific.
When the Wave Gliders launched,
Jenkins hadn’t even started building.
Still, he knew his boat was at
least five times faster, and he calculated that he could beat the Wave
Gliders to Australia even if he got a late start.
But by the time he was
able to raise the necessary funds—largely through a grant from the
Marine Science and Technology Foundation—the clock had run out.
After
more than 300 days at sea, two Wave Gliders made it to Australia.
The
other two broke down en route to Japan; only one was recovered.
Saildrone may not have had a chance to best Liquid Robotics on the
water, but a head-to-head comparison of the two companies is no contest.
Liquid Robotics is seven years old, employs 110 people, and has now
raised more than $77 million in venture capital.
The total bill for
Saildrone, three years into the project, including what Jenkins and
Owens pay themselves and their two helpers?
“Less than $400,000,” says
Wendy Schmidt, wife of Google executive chair Eric Schmidt. (The couple
funds the Marine Science and Technology Foundation.)

Schmidt regales me with stories of Jenkins’ incredible talent for
dollar-stretching.
“He obtained massive amounts of carbon-fiber castoffs
from his contacts in the yachting industry; he bought a broken $25,000
milling machine on craigslist for $2,000 and fixed it himself; he sublet
an 800-square-foot workshop and then doubled it by building another
floor!” Schmidt says.
“I mean, who does that?”

“Poverty is the mother of invention,” Jenkins says, and then he shows me the tail tab control—the throttle—inside the Greenbird’s
cockpit.
It’s just a piece of string connected to the tail by means of
an antique fishing reel.
“My grandfather’s,” he says.
“It was just
cobbled together out of parts I had.”

The morning after the Honey Badger
arrives in Hawaii, it’s time to send her out again.
The new mission is
to spin the odometer past 7,939 nautical miles and thus rob Liquid
Robotics of its endurance record.
Barefoot on the dock of the Kaneohe
Yacht Club, Jenkins opens his iPad and drops a few new waypoints into
the Honey Badger’s brain—aiming it around the South Pole and
toward the equatorial Pacific.
If successful, it will be the first drone
of any kind to “circumcise the world,” as Jenkins gleefully puts it.
It’s approximately 25,000 miles—10 times the distance to Hawaii—with no
pit stops.
What are the odds?

“It’s a long shot,” says Jenkins, who points out that Saildrone was
designed to get to Hawaii, no more.
“We cut a lot of corners when we
started,” Owens agrees, “because we were paying for it out of our own
pockets.” Hawaii was the milestone that Schmidt wanted.
“Every sailing
journey that I’ve ever been on has been a near disaster,” says Jenkins,
sipping his beer from the bottle. “We’ll see.”
A month later Jenkins and Owens are in their new shop in Alameda,
California.
It’s cavernous—an acre of covered space on a decommissioned
Navy base—and littered with all sorts of fun engineering projects in
various stages of completion.
In a far corner is the Greenbird,
now shod with skates and being prepped for an eventual run at the
ice-sailing record.
Off to one side is the carbon-fiber shell of a
seaplane that Jenkins is building.
Across one wall is the beginning of a
Saildrone production line. Orders are starting to come in.
But
dominating the workshop and in the center of everything is another wing,
one far bigger than the 20-foot-high drone wing, bigger even than the Greenbirds’s 28-foot-high wing.
This one is the people mover.

The ferry wing is the culmination of six years of lobbying by Jay
Gardner, a self-described “self-employed hippie” who operates a small
boat-charter company out of San Francisco.
The winds that blow through
the Golden Gate year-round, the 60-year-old Gardner says, “are the
closest thing to a perpetual-motion machine we’ve got.”

Dominating the workshop is another wing, one far bigger than the Greenbirds’s 28-foot-high wing. This one is the people mover.

Armed with an engineering study that predicts that sails retrofitted
onto Bay Area ferries would cut yearly fuel costs by 30 to 40 percent,
Gardner managed to get seed funding for a real-world ferry-wing test.
When it came time to actually spend that money, the choices were to
acquire and fix up a $10 million experimental ferry wing that the Navy
had partially built or to hire Jenkins to build a scaled-up version of
his Saildrone wing for pennies on the Navy’s dollar.
Going with Jenkins
was not just a question of cost, however.
Thanks to the sail-with-a-tail
design, his technology requires no knowledge of sailing to use.
“You
can have a button that says ‘Turn off the wind assist,’” Gardner says.

The wing sail is 40 feet high, 10 feet across, and as thick as a man
is wide, but its fuel-saving potential—anywhere from $500,000 to $1
million per ferry per year—must be verified by scientists from UC
Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center.
They will be
rolling it out of the shop, standing it up, and using a crane to mount
it on a passenger-carrying trimaran that will travel around the bay for
three months.
“It’s going to be awesome,” Jenkins says, his face turning
froggy.
“We’re two weeks away from an erection.”
The ferry wing is just
getting its finishing touches when Jenkins announces to his staff of
two—a boatbuilder and a sander—that it’s time to go to the pub for the
traditional Friday afternoon pint.

Before Jenkins leaves the shed, he checks on the Honey Badger’s
progress for the day.
The odometer stands at 6,000 nautical miles, but
something looks wrong.
Digging into the data he realizes that the sensor
that measures the rudder’s angle is sending random garbage to
Saildrone’s brain. Salt water must have somehow infiltrated the
connection.
“That was the last analog circuit on the boat prone to
corrosion,” Jenkins says, cursing himself for not having upgraded it.
“The new version of the boat is all digital.”

Jenkins and Owens start sending commands to the drone and realize
that all is not lost.
Even without the rudder, the wing should be able
to steer it back to port.
“It’s a long way from dead,” Jenkins says.
Reviving the boat is a simple matter of swapping the old-style analog
rudder encoder with the new-style digital encoder.
The only catch is
that they’ll have to go to Hawaii to do it.
Another trip to Hawaii?
The crew greets the news with a chorus of clinking glasses: “Honey Badger don’t care.”
And then they raise their pints high for their traditional toast. “Honey Badger don’t give a shit!”